AAAA Records

Table of Contents

What is an AAAA record?

An AAAA record maps a domain name to the IP address (Version 6) of the computer hosting the domain. Simply put, an AAAA record is used to find the IP address of a computer connected to the internet from a name.

The AAAA record is conceptually similar to the A record, but it allows you to specify the IPv6 address of the server, rather than the IPv4.

As for the A records, you can use multiple AAAA records for the same domain in order to provide redundancy. Additionally, multiple names could point to the same address, in which case each would have its own AAAA record pointing to that same IP address.

AAAA record format

The structure of an AAAA record follows the standard top-level format definition defined RFC 1035. The RDATA section is composed of one single element:

address

A 128 bit Internet address representing an IPv6 address

Hosts that have multiple Internet addresses have multiple A records.

The canonical representation is:

AAAA <address>

where <address> is an IPv6 address and looks like 2400:cb00:2049:1::a29f:1804.

In DNSimple, the AAAA record is represented by the following customizable elements:

Name

The host name for the record, without the domain name. This is generally referred to as “subdomain”. We automatically append the domain name.

TTL

The time-to-live in seconds. This is the amount of time the record is allowed to be cached by a resolver.

Address

The IPv6 address the AAAA record points to.

Querying AAAA records

You can use dig to determine the AAAA record associated with a domain name. The result is contained in the ANSWER section. It contains the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), the remaining time-to-live (TTL) and the IP address.